Randy Boyagoda on A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

“The Jamaica that emerges from James’s impressive third novel is an often vile and perpetually violent place, populated by kill-or-be-killed shanty-town gangsters whose moneymaking ventures and vendettas are fully fused with prominent figures and important events in the country’s history.”

Leo Robson on Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

“McCarthy’s revolution is wholly one of content, with form a mere enabler. He likes the image of the Trojan horse; he has said that the historical-realist surface of C allowed him to smuggle in ‘modernist and avant-garde preoccupations’. Satin Island is another Trojan horse, this one not so armoured.”

Hedley Twidle on The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

“The peculiar, at times frustrating pleasure of the book is in tracing how this mythic kernel is spun out and worried over for more than 300 pages: approached from different perspectives, now through the adult “I”, now the child “I”; returned to, led up to many times, as if the narrative voice does not quite understand the story it is telling, picking its odd and wilful way through “the vast territory of the past”.

Alice O’Keeffe on The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota

“A wise and compassionate observer of humanity, [Sahota] has gone to some dark places – places we would all rather not think about – to bring us this book. Whether we are prepared to extend a measure of his wisdom and compassion to real immigrants, in the real world, is another question.”

Leo Robson on A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler 

“Tyler’s greatest asset is her gloriously free and offhand approach to exposition. The novel’s opening chapter . . . is a tumble of incident and detail, astonishingly adept ithout being boastful . . . Tyler has an infinite supply of fiddly insights about her characters’ habits and vices, but she exposes them in slow-burn effects as well.”

Alex Clark on A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara

“The problem is not what the novel makes you feel but what it makes you think. In my case, I felt engaged, compelled to read further, caught up in something; I also felt dismay, disbelief, pity, horror. But at the end of 736 pages, many of which I suspect could have been edited out without compromising the novel’s directness or its power, my thoughts revolved around the creation and prosecution of the novel, why Yanagihara had written it in the way that she had. . . . Although it is not the job of fiction to educate, it is odd to foreground such extreme subject matter without wanting to say something new about it. And it is odd to read such an in-depth treatment of it and come away thinking: well, yeah, obviously.”

“Another world is possible,” declared John McDonnell last month in his first major speech as Labour’s new shadow chancellor. These four words show how Labour’s leadership views its relationship with activists and campaigners outside the Westminster system. The slogan is the motto of the World Social Forum, an annual alternative to the ultra-elite World Economic Forum, formed by social movements across the world to struggle against, and build alternatives to, neoliberalism.

How times change. In a speech given at the George Bush Senior Presidential Library in Texas, United States, in April 2002, Labour leader and British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered his support to the administrators of the global economy, not those demonstrating against them.

He said: “It's time we took on the anti-globalisation protestors who seek to disrupt the meetings international leaders have on these issues. What the poor world needs is not less globalisation but more. Their injustice is not globalisation but being excluded from it. Free enterprise is not their enemy; but their friend.”

In 2002, Labour’s leadership wanted to take on social movements. Now, it intends to engage with and support them. “The new kind of politics” of Labour’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is about more than focusing on issues over personalities and (anti-) presentational changes.

It is also “a new politics which is based on returning the Labour party to its roots. And the roots of the Labour party was as a social movement, representing the vast majority of working people in this country,” as McDonnell, Corbyn’s closest political ally, explains to the New Statesman.

Campaigners outside of the Labour party are excited. John Hilary, executive director of War on Want, a campaigning anti-poverty NGO, tells the New Statesman, “there’s a really positive impulse to the Corbyn/McDonnell leadership reaching out” to social movements. For Hilary, the immediate policy changes on TTIP – the EU-US investor rights, regulation harmonisation and non-tariff barriers deal negotiated behind closed doors – and a Financial Transaction Tax have already sent “a message to a disenfranchised part of the electorate that Labour is back”.

But, for the campaigners outside of the Labour party, this moment is not without risks. Political parties have a long record of crushing the autonomy of social movements.

“It’s important they aren’t incorporated or have to work on the terms of the political system. It’s a matter of a respectful relationship,” explains Hilary Wainwright, a political activist and founder and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine. Wainwright argues for “close engagement [between Labour and outside campaigners] that isn’t a bossy dominating one. One that seeks to collaborate, not govern”.

McDonnell agrees. “The most important thing,” he says, “is that all of the campaigns and social movements that are campaigning at the moment and those that will campaign in the future, need to maintain their autonomy from government and political parties. We respect that . . . Otherwise, we’ll undermine their vitality and their independence.”

To remain “strong, independent and radical” is “the most helpful” campaigners can be to Labour’s leadership, according to Hilary. Labour’s leadership “don’t look to us to make the sort of political compromises that they might have to do in order to hold a much broader spectrum of people together. What we can do best is hold that line as we believe it be right and support the Labour leadership in taking a line as close as possible to that”, he says.

The task for social movements and campaigners outside of the party is “to show how there will be popular support for radical and principled positions”, according to Hilary.

To win in 2020, Labour will “bring together a coalition of social movements that have changed the political climate in this country and, as a result of that, changed the electoral potential of the Labour Party as well”, says McDonnell. For Labour’s shadow chancellor, the people's views on issues are complex and fluid rather than static, making the job of politicians to bump up as close to them as possible.

Movements can help shift political common sense in Labour’s direction. Just as UK Uncut placed the issue of tax avoidance and tax justice firmly on the political map, so too can other campaigners shift the political terrain.

This movement-focused perspective may, in part, explain why the Corbyn campaign chose to transform itself last week into the Momentum movement, a grassroots network open to those without Labour membership cards. This approach stands in contrast to Blair’s leadership campaign that evolved into Progress, a New Labour pressure group and think tank made up of party members.

In order to allow movements the space to change the terms of the debate and for Labour to develop policy in conjunction with them, the party needs “to engage with movements on their own terms”, according to Wainwright. This means “the party leadership need to find out where people are struggling and where people are campaigning and specifically work with them”, she continues.

McDonnell says it will. He says Labour “want to work alongside them, give them a parliamentary voice, give them a voice in government but, more importantly, assist them in the work that they do within the wide community, both in meetings, demonstrations and on picket lines”.

This position is not one you would expect from McDonnell’s five more recent predecessors: Chris Leslie, Ed Balls, Alan Johnson, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown. So, “this may seem like a unique moment if you’re looking just within the British context. But, if you look outside Britain it’s actually much more in touch with movements in many places in the world”, says Hilary.

He adds: “Political parties are going to have to have much more honest engagements between parliamentary politics and the social movement hinterland. For us, it just means that in a wonderful way, Britain is catching up with the rest of the world.”

McDonnell too sees this shift in how Labour engages with movements as “a historic change that modernises the Labour party”.

But, perhaps for Labour, this is a recurrence rather than a transformation. The party grew out of Britain’s biggest social movement: the unions. Labour’s new leadership’s openness to campaigners “modernises it by taking it back to being a social movement again”, says McDonnell. 

It has been more than a year since the Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to passing legislation to impose a ban on the suffering of circus animals in England and Wales. How long does it take to get something done in Parliament?

I was an MP for more than two decades, so that’s a rhetorical question. I’m well aware that important issues like this one can drag on, but the continued lack of action to help stop the suffering of animals in circuses is indefensible.

Although the vast majority of the British public doesn’t want wild animals used in circuses (a public consultation on the issue found that more than 94 per cent of the public wanted to see a ban implemented and the Prime Minister promised to prohibit the practice by January 2015, no government bill on this issue was introduced during the last parliament.

A private member’s bill, introduced in 2013, was repeatedly blocked in the House of Commons by three MPs, so it needs a government bill to be laid if we are to have any hope of seeing this practice banned.

This colossal waste of time shames Britain, while all around the world, governments have been taking decisive action to stop the abuse of wild animals in circuses. Just last month, Catalonia’s Parliament overwhelmingly voted to ban it. While our own lawmakers dragged their feet, the Netherlands approved a ban that comes into effect later this year, as did Malta and Mexico. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, North America’s longest-running circus, has pledged to retire all the elephants it uses by 2018. Even in Iran, a country with precious few animal-welfare laws, 14 states have banned this archaic form of entertainment. Are we really lagging behind Iran?

The writing has long been on the wall. Only two English circuses are still clinging to this antiquated tradition of using wild animals, so implementing a ban would have very little bearing on businesses operating in England and Wales. But it would have a very positive impact on the animals still being exploited.

Every day that this legislation is delayed is another one of misery for the large wild animals, including tigers, being hauled around the country in circus wagons. Existing in cramped cages and denied everything that gives their lives meaning, animals become lethargic and depressed. Their spirits broken, many develop neurotic and abnormal behaviour, such as biting the bars of their cages and constantly pacing. It’s little wonder that such tormented creatures die far short of their natural life spans.

Watching a tiger jump through a fiery hoop may be entertaining to some, but we should all be aware of what it entails for the animal. UK laws require that animals be provided with a good quality of life, but the cruelty inherent in confining big, wild animals, who would roam miles in the wild, to small, cramped spaces and forcing them to engage in unnatural and confusing spectacles makes that impossible in circuses.

Those who agree with me can join PETA’s campaign to urge government to listen to the public and give such animals a chance to live as nature intended.

The Right Honourable Ann Widdecombe was an MP for 23 years and served as Shadow Home Secretary. She is a novelist, documentary maker and newspaper columnist.

Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first computer program. In the 1840s Charles Babbage, now known as the “father of the computer”, designed (though never built) the “Analytical Engine”, a machine which could accurately and reproducibly calculate the answers to maths problems. While translating an article by an Italian mathematician about the machine, Lovelace included a written algorithm for which would allow the engine to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.

Around 170 years later, Whitney Wolfe, one of the founders of dating app Tinder, was allegedly forced to resign from the company. According to a lawsuit she later filed against the app and its parent company, she had her co-founder title removed because, the male founders argued, it would look “slutty”, and because “Facebook and Snapchat don’t have girl founders. It just makes it look like Tinder was some accident". (They settled out of court.)

Today, 13 October, is Ada Lovelace day– an international celebration of inspirational women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It’s lucky we have this day of remembrance, because, as Wolfe’s story demonstrates, we also spend a lot of time forgetting and sidelining women in tech. In the wash of pale male founders of the tech giants that rule the industry,we don't often think about the women that shaped its foundations: Judith Estrin, one of the designers of TCP/IP, for example, or Radia Perlman, inventor of the spanning-tree protocol. Both inventions sound complicated, and they are – they’re some of the vital building blocks that allow the internet to function. 

And yet David Streitfield, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, someow felt it accurate to write in 2012: “Men invented the internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolised Mr Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died.”

Perhaps we forget about tech's founding women because the needle has swung so far into the other direction. A huge proportion – perhaps even 90 per cent - of the world’s code is written by men. At Google, women fill 17 per cent of technical roles. At Facebook, 15 per cent. Over 90 per cent of the code respositories on Github, an online service used throughout the industry, are owned by men. Yet it's also hard to believe that this erasure of women's role in tech is completely accidental. As Elissa Shevinsky writes in the introduction to a collection of essays on gender in tech, Lean Out: “This myth of the nerdy male founder has been perpetuated by men who found this story favourable."

Does it matter? It’s hard to believe that it doesn’t. Our society is increasingly defined and delineated by code and the things it builds. Small slip-ups, like the lack of a period tracker on the original Apple Watch, or fitness trackers too big for some women’s wrists, gesture to the fact that these technologies are built by male-dominated teams, for a male audience.

In Lean Out, one essay written by a Twitter-based “start-up dinosaur” (don’t ask) explains how dangerous it is to allow one small segment of society to built the future for the rest of us:

If you let someone else build tomorrow, tomorrow will belong to someone else. They will build a better tomorrow for everyone like them… For tomorrow to be for everyone, everyone needs to be the one [sic] that build it.

So where did all the women go? How did we get from a rash of female inventors to a situation where the major female presence at an Apple iPhone launch is a model’s face projected onto a screen and photoshopped into a smile by a male demonstrator? 

Photo: Apple.

The toxic culture of many tech workplaces could be a cause or an effect of the lack of women in the industry, but it certainly can’t make make it easy to stay. Behaviours range from the ignorant - Martha Lane-Fox, founder of lastminute.com, often asked “what happens if you get pregnant?” at investors' meetings - to the much more sinister. An essay in Lean Out by Katy Levinson details her experiences of sexual harassment while working in tech: 

I have had interviewers attempt to solicit sexual favors from me mid-interview and discuss in significant detail precisely what they would like to do. All of these things have happened either in Silicon Valley working in tech, in an educational institution to get me there, or in a technical internship.

Others featured in the book joined in with the low-level sexism and racism  of their male colleagues in order to "fit in" and deflect negative attention. Erica Joy writes that while working in IT at the University of Alaska as the only woman (and only black person) on her team, she laughed at colleagues'"terribly racist and sexist jokes" and "co-opted their negative attitudes”. 

The casual culture and allegedly meritocratic hierarchies of tech companies may actually be encouraging this discriminatory atmosphere. HR and the strict reporting procedures of large corporates at least give those suffering from discrimination a place to go. A casual office environment can discourage reporting or calling out prejudiced humour or remarks. Brook Shelley, a woman who transitioned while working in tech, notes: "No one wants to be the office mother". So instead, you join in and hope for the best. 

And, of course, there's no reason why people working in tech would have fewer issues with discrimination than those in other industries. A childhood spent as a "nerd" can also spawn its own brand of misogyny - Katherine Cross writes in Lean Out that “to many of these men [working in these fields]...it is all too easy to subconciously confound women who say ‘this is sexist’ with the young girls who said… ‘You’re gross and a creep and I’ll never date you'". During GamerGate, Anita Sarkeesian was often called a "prom queen" by trolls. 

When I spoke to Alexa Clay, entrepreneur and co-author of the Misfit Economy, she confirmed that there's a strange, low-lurking sexism in the start-up economy: “They have all very open and free, but underneath it there's still something really patriarchal.” Start-ups, after all, are a culture which celebrates risk-taking, something which women are societally discouraged from doing. As Clay says, 

“Men are allowed to fail in tech. You have these young guys who these old guys adopt and mentor. If his app doesn’t work, the mentor just shrugs it off. I would not be able ot get away with that, and I think women and minorities aren't allowed to take the same amount of risks, particularly in these communities. If you fail, no one's saying that's fine.

The conclusion of Lean Out, and of women in tech I have spoken to, isn’t that more women, over time, will enter these industries and seamlessly integrate – it’s that tech culture needs to change, or its lack of diversity will become even more severe. Shevinsky writes:

The reason why we don't have more women in tech is not because of a lack of STEM education. It's because too many high profile and influential individuals and subcultures within the tech industry have ignored or outright mistreated women applicants and employees. To be succinct—the problem isn't women, it's tech culture.

Software engineer Kate Heddleston has a wonderful and chilling metaphor about the way we treat women in STEM. Women are, she writes, the “canary in the coal mine”. If one dies, surely you should take that as a sign that the mine is uninhabitable – that there’s something toxic in the air. “Instead, the industry is looking at the canary, wondering why it can’t breathe, saying ‘Lean in, canary, lean in!’. When one canary dies they get a new one because getting more canaries is how you fix the lack of canaries, right? Except the problem is that there isn't enough oxygen in the coal mine, not that there are too few canaries.” We need more women in STEM, and, I’d argue, in tech in particular, but we need to make sure the air is breatheable first. 

It’s fair to say that the last 24 hours – in which Labour painfully U-Turned on its support for George Osborne’s Fiscal Charter – have not been the most successful of John McDonnell’s political life.

Having signed up to the Conservatives’ fiscal charter without consulting his colleagues a fortnight ago, he announced Labour’s opposition to the measure again without consultation – and without a clear idea as to why. A worsening global economy, the government’s failure to bail out the steelworks in Redcar have both been wheeled out as excuses.

Of course, a fortnight ago, Redcar’s steelworks was still on the brink and the global economy’s “Titanic problem” – a shortage of lifeboats, an excess of icebergs – was very much a factor two weeks ago.

And to be frank, there are no circumstances in which Osborne’s fiscal charter was good economics or good politics. The economics of it are straightforwardly bad: by committing to an overall surplus, the government effectively rules out borrowing to invest in infrastructure.

As Chi Onwurah, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow ministers, explained on the Staggers over the summer:

“The Osbornomic farmer wouldn’t borrow to buy a tractor unless crop prices were falling. The Osbornomic househunter would not take out a mortgage unless her salary was being cut. The Osbornomic CEO would only invest in a new product line when revenues were falling.”

It’s a bit like promising never to go into your overdraft, even if your car breaks down and you need to get it fixed to go to work next week. Signing up to it would have meant, as I wrote a fortnight ago, that Labour would be going into the next election calling for hefty tax rises not just on the top rate (45p in the pound) but also the higher (40p) and basic (20p) rates of income tax.

Going into the election promising across-the-board tax rises is politically toxic, and with wage recovery still sluggish and large numbers of people struggling to get by, could choke off demand in the economy just as surely as Osborne’s overzealous fiscal retrenchment.

The problem for McDonnell is all of this was obvious just two weeks ago. Labour’s MPs on the Treasury Select Committee had already dismantled the charter in July. Although the two Eds committed Labour to a current account surplus, the new, much more austere alternative, would have been beyond the pale for them, too.

That’s why the parliamentary Labour party is so angry. Many suspect the U-Turn comes not because of changes in the economy, but because McDonnell simply hadn’t read or understood the charter. Incompetence – a frequent bugbear under Miliband – is seen as a greater sin than profligacy.

But, all that said, ignore for a moment how Labour got here. U-Turns are politically embarrassing, yes. But the biggest political mistakes tend to come from a failure to U-Turn. As Andrew Adonis said to me: “good governments U-Turn, and U-Turn frequently: take the poll tax. At every point, a U-Turn would have been better than carrying on with the policy: at the Green Paper, at the White Paper, after it had been trialled in Scotland. In the end, the government fell, and the new one U-Turned on it anyway.” The same holds true for Oppositions. 

As I wrote yesterday, the government’s problems over tax credits are so deep-rooted that a simple U-Turn may not be enough to get them out of the hole. But kicking the implementation of Osborne’s minimum wage hike and the cuts to tax credits in the long run, while embarrassing for the Chancellor, would be a better move than driving straight into the wall. The same is certainly true for McDonnell, who for all his avoidable embarrassment, has a better policy today than he did this time last week. 

More than 59 million people around the world are currently displaced as a result of conflict and crisis. More than 500,000 of these refugees – the majority of them escaping the deadly civil war in Syria – have fled to Europe over the past several months. These are staggering numbers, and as with any large-scale human crisis, one key challenge is to comprehend the human suffering behind them.

Over the past two weeks, New York photographer Brandon Stanton – best known for his project Humans of New York (HONY) – has documented the human stories behind the migrant crisis, in partnership with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Through HONY, Stanton has catalogued the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, using photographs and short interviews with his subjects. The project is hugely popular across social media, including Facebook (15.5m likes), Instagram (3.9m followers) and Twitter (356,000 followers), and his book documenting the project became a New York Times bestseller. On September 29, he announced that he would be sharing stories from refugees who are making their way across Europe. He said:

These migrants are part of one of the largest population movements in modern history. But their stories are composed of unique and singular tragedies. In the midst of the current ‘migrant crisis’, there are millions of different reasons for leaving home. And there are millions of different hardships that refugees face as they search for a new home.

Since then, the site has shared the stories of government clerks from Baghdad, Nepalese engineers, Afghani interpreters and Syrian waiters who left everything behind and embarked on treacherous and sometimes deadly journeys to reach safety. But the question remains: how much can readers learn about a complex, global, political issue like mass migration from a handful of stories about individual people?

Pulling on the heartstrings

The project quite deliberately tugs on the heartstrings of its audiences in its attempt to generate empathy for the refugees. One typical post, featuring a photograph of a crying woman, tells the story of how she lost her husband at sea after their boat capsized: “The waves were high. I could hear him calling me but he got further and further away. Eventually a boat found me.”

“My husband and I sold everything we had to afford the journey. We worked 15 hours a day in Turkey until we..."pic.twitter.com/3PitF265iN

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) September 28, 2015

Another post, featuring a photograph of a father and his daughter, is particularly touching:

“I wish I could have done more for her. Her life has been nothing but struggle. She hasn’t known many happy..."pic.twitter.com/eHeDIHLOv9

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) September 28, 2015

Because of its distinctive style and approach, the site has not been immune to ridicule and criticism. Countless parody accounts have sprung up. These include Millennials of New York, which attempts to offer stories that are “a little less inspirational”; Felines of New York, Lizard People of New York, Pigeons of Boston and Goats of Bangladesh– to mention just a few.

But HONY also has more serious critics to reckon with. Some suggest that Stanton's stories are mere caricatures, which oversimplify and sentimentalise what are often very complex stories, and seek to emotionally manipulate audiences through clickbaiting. Debates rage over whether it can be seen as a form of journalism and, if not, how we should understand the project.

Critics may be right that Humans of New York is not journalism as we know it. After all, it shies away from claims to objectivity and is explicit about its moral aim to humanise the headlines; to dig beneath the numbers and reveal the human stories that might make audiences empathise with the suffering of distant others. The project takes place in partnership with the UN, and therefore more appropriately belongs safely in the category of humanitarian advocacy through storytelling.

Time-honoured traditions

Yet HONY borrows from long-standing journalistic and documentary practices. For example, the British social documentary movement, which started in the 1930s, was premised on the importance of telling the stories of “ordinary” people to counter the dominance of elite and upper-class in the media.

My own research on the role of emotion in journalistic story-telling demonstrates that the most highly regarded journalism – Pulitzer Prize winning reports – draw extensively on emotive and personal story-telling as a means of illustrating what are often very complex and abstract issues, ranging from the fate of the New Jersey fishing industry to breakthroughs in the use of DNA technology for medical treatments.

This is precisely because it is only through such personal stories that we can step into the shoes of others – whose lives and experiences may be very different from our own. Humans of New York may be sentimental, simplistic and saccharine to some, but it also represents a major achievement. Using time-honoured journalistic techniques, it has shown its audience that the personal and private stories of refugees represent a shared political reality, which we ignore at our peril.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Professor; Director of Research Development and Environment, School of Journalism, Cardiff University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Labour is offering the Tories another chance to do the right thing on tax credits. We’ve tabled an amendment to the Welfare Bill that would stop these cuts in their tracks, which will be voted on in Bill Committee a week today (Tuesday 20^th).

When the tax credit cuts were voted on first time round, the Treasury hadn’t done its homework, the Tories hadn’t consulted their MPs and the true scale of the cuts was unclear to the public.  One month later and all that’s changed. The Treasury has had its homework done for it by others, the Tories are divided over their impact and the true scale of the cuts has been made bluntly apparent to the three million working families who’ll be hit the hardest.

The Resolution Foundation, the IFS and the House of Commons Library all lay bare the reality of where these cuts will fall. In contrast to Cameron’s implausible rhetoric, they show clearly that the cuts are a penalty on work from the same old anti-worker Tories.  In fact, so heavy will these cuts fall on working families that the Tories are tearing themselves in two over them. Warnings of the new poll tax have been met with the widespread observation that the cuts relegate the Tories’ “workers’ party” claim even further, from lamentable to laughable.

With more light being shone on these cuts than David Cameron had either wanted or anticipated, it’s not surprising the public has reacted so strongly to their impact and to the sheer number of families who’ll be made worse off.  For a start, four in ten of all households will be hit one way or another by his changes to tax credits and benefits. On his specific cut to tax credits, three million in-work families will lose out by over a thousand pound a year – and the rise in the minimum wage does little to make up for it. 

It’s no wonder hundreds of thousands have signed petitions calling on the government to stop these cuts. Angry at how pre-election, unspecific cuts from shy Tory MPs have turned into post-election, targeted cuts from brazen Tory Ministers.  David Cameron should listen to these concerns and realise the debate of a month ago isn’t the debate of today. The facts have become clear and he should change his plans.

My message for him is simple: these anti-worker tax credit cuts are not a done deal. Your party is split and public opinion is shifting away from you. All the evidence shows poverty will soar and people in work will suffer the most.  We’re giving you a fresh opportunity to stop the cuts to tax credits. For the sake of millions of working families in Britain and their children, take it.

Marlon James has become the first Jamaican author to win the Man Booker Prize since the award was founded in 1969. His third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, was published earlier this year by Oneworld: it is the first Booker winner for this relatively young independent imprint that initially focused on nonfiction but has since branched out into publishing fiction, often with an international focus. 

James, born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970, gave up writing fiction after his first novel was rejected 78 times. Eventually a fellow writer persuaded him to retrieve the manuscript and John Crow's Devil was published in 2005. At the ceremony last night at London's Guildhall James dedicated the award to his father, a devotee of Coleridge and Shakespeare who used to challenge his son to “solliloquy battles” – competitions to see who could recite the longer Shakespearean monologue.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a sprawling, violent, multi-voiced narrative circling around an assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976. Randy Boyagoda, who reviewed the book in the New Statesman, called it a a  effort” and “a great – if grim – success.” Read the full review here.

The UK will have a referendum by the end of 2017 on whether or not to remain a member of the European Union. There will be a nationwide vote at some point – most likely in late 2016 or early 2017 – when the electorate will decide to “remain” or “leave”.

The question, proposed by the Electoral Commission and accepted by Downing Street, will most likely be: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

Cross-party campaign groups on either side of the debate are beginning to form. It’s up to the Electoral Commission which of these groups will become the official campaign for each side. What are these groups, and who is associated with each one?

In

Britain Stronger in Europe

What?

The key group trying to convince voters that the UK should remain in the EU.

Who’s in charge?

Stuart Rose, Tory peer and former Marks & Spencer chairman.

Who else is involved?

Big names on the board include Karren Brady, West Ham United vice-chair, Tory peer and Apprentice aide; Danny Alexander, former Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury; Megan Dunn, National Union of Students president; Caroline Lucas, Green party MP and former leader; Peter Mandelson, Labour peer and former Business Secretary; Brendan Barber, former Trades Union Congress secretary-general, Peter Wall, former Army chief; Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre.

Its executive director is Will Straw, former Labour candidate and son of former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Its director of strategy is Ryan Coetzee, who was behind the Lib Dems’ most recent general election campaign.

The three living former prime ministers, John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown, are backing this campaign.

It also has a group of cross-party “champions”: Tories Flick Drummond MP, Sajjad Karim MEP, Ben Howlett MP, and Damain Green MP; Labour MPs Emma Reynolds, Stephen Kinnock and Chuka Umunna; Lib Dem peer Jim Wallace, and Green MP Caroline Lucas

Show me the money!

David Sainsbury, the Labour peer, supermarket heir and billionaire businessman, is providing seed funding for this campaign.

Strengths:

Boasts backers from across the political, business and public spectrum. Looks relatively diverse, with a reasonable gender balance. It’s the main cross-party “In” campaign.

Weaknesses:

Launched on Monday 12 October – later than its rivals, and has been accused by business leaders of “playing catch up”. Lacks a charismatic leader – Lord Rose isn’t particularly exciting.

Most notable moment so far?

TV presenter June Sarpong (who is also on the board) launching the campaign to attract the “younger vote” – in the process baffling young journalists and viewers who had never heard of her.

British Influence

What?

British Influence started out as the embryonic EU “In” campaign in 2012, a cross-party pressure group “making the argument for Britain to have influence in a Europe that we know has to change, but the exit door's not the answer”, as former Labour frontbencher Alan Johnson explained to me late last year. It now describes itself as a “key partner” of the main campaign, Britain Stronger in Europe. The latter has an open dialogue with British Influence, but emphasises that it is an independent organisation and a separate entity.

Who’s in charge?

Peter Wilding, an EU political commentator and solicitor in EU law, is the founder and director. He describes himself as “neither a ‘phile’ nor a ‘phobe’, just a realist campaigning for British influence in Europe”.

Who else is involved?

A range of politicians from different parties have been associated with the group, including Johnson, Alexander, Mandelson, and the former Tory ministers Ken Clarke and Damian Green. Though still sympathisers, some of these figures have found other priorities – Johnson is leading the “Labour Yes” campaign, and British Influence informs me that Clarke is heading up the Conservative equivalent, for example.

Show me the money!

Has also received support from Lord Sainsbury.

Strengths:

A well-known ally of the main campaign. The springboard for pro-EU politicians campaigning across party lines.

Weaknesses:

Its influence has dwindled as its politicians have drifted to their party political pro-EU campaigns and to the main cross-party campaign.

Most notable moment so far?

Securing three big-hitters (Mandelson, Alexander and Clarke) from each of the main parties (at the time) as its co-presidents.

Out

Vote Leave

What?

The main “Out” campaign. It was launched on 9 October 2015, and is seen as the classier of the movements to leave the EU.

Who’s in charge?

Matthew Elliott, who founded the influential campaign group Taxpayers’ Alliance, and ran the successful campaign against AV; Dominic Cummings, the former special adviser to Michael Gove, who writes about policy and politics.

Who else is involved?

It has a cross-party group of politicians on board, including the eurosceptic MPs heading up Labour’s anti-EU group, Labour Leave, Kate Hoey and Kelvin Hopkins. It also has the Tory “Out” movement – Conservatives for Britain – onside, founded by Tory MP Steve Baker with backers including the former Chancellor Nigel Lawson. Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s only MP, is a supporter – breaking ranks from the party line, which is to back Leave.EU.

Business for Britain, a group of UK business leaders, is also backing Vote Leave.

Show me the money!

A political coalition of funds coming from Tory donor and city millionaire Peter Cruddas, Labour’s biggest individual donor (before he pulled his funds after Jeremy Corbyn’s win) John Mills, and Stuart Wheeler, a Tory-turned-Ukip donor.

Strengths:

It is seen as the main business-backed, cross-party movement against Britain’s EU membership. It has backers from across the political spectrum.

Weaknesses:

It looks a bit pale, male and stale compared to its main “In” rival. It has to compete with another “Out” campaign, which is backed by Ukip.

Most notable moment so far?

When Carswell chose it over the Ukip-backed campaign. Also a hint at the TUC conference this year that the GMB union could be onside.

Leave.EU

What?

The alternative “Out” campaign, styling itself as the “grassroots” anti-EU movement. It is favoured by Nigel Farage, who has referred to it as an “umbrella group that will lead the campaign” against Britain’s EU membership. It focuses on the argument about UK’s borders, more so than the financial pros and cons.

Who’s in charge?

The CEO is businesswoman Liz Bilney, though Farage is the unofficial frontman.

Who else is involved?

Wealthy Ukip donor Arron Banks is the founder, and most of Ukip is onside (apart from its only MP, Carswell, see above), as are some British business figures like entrepreneur Jim Mellon and Blackwell books’ Toby Blackwell. It claims to have over 200,000 supporters.

Show me the money!

Banks is the main financial backer.

Strengths:

The anti-immigration argument could be an easier vote winner than complex debates about investment and business. Farage is a popular politician.

Weaknesses:

Not as well respected as its “Out” rival, Vote Leave, because it lacks cross-party consensus and a broad base of business backers. Its name is also a bit odd.

Most notable moment so far?

Having to change its name from “The Know” (already a little strange) when the Electoral Commission tweaked the wording of the referendum question to be a “Remain/Leave” answer rather than a “Yes/No” answer.

It would be wrong to suggest that Emmeline Pankhurst and her fellow crusaders for equality would be turning in their graves if they could see what had been done to their story in the new film Suffragette. On the contrary, it’s so timid that they would probably turn over and fall straight back into their eternal slumber. The setting is a poverty-stricken corner of east London circa 1912. The cobblestones are steaming and the urchins are scampering cheerfully in the gutters while white sheets hang permanently in the sun on clothes lines suspended from one side of the street to the other. It would be reasonable to ask why no one ever takes ‘em inside and puts ‘em on the bleedin’ mattresses. But that’d diminish the full Angela’s Ashes poverty chic, you ‘ear me?

Sorry about that. The cast has worked so diligently on its Cockney accents that it’s hard not to slip into one yourself after spending nearly two hours in their company. “’Appy birthdee”, trills the budding suffragette Maud to her young son. And when I tell you that Maud is played by Carey Mulligan, you will appreciate the effort that went into dropping those aitches. No dialogue coach in the world, though, can put pain where there isn’t any. Whether scrunching up her nose at beastly politicians or twisting her mouth as she is force-fed in prison, the truth is that Mulligan does not have the face for suffering.

As a fellow suffragette, Anne-Marie Duff is more like it: she resembles a pick-axe; she can project anguish from within as she uses her entire body and physiognomy to chip and hack away at the injustice she sees. It’s beyond Mulligan’s capabilities – at least for now. It isn’t that she is miscast exactly. The director Sarah Gavron wanted someone sympathetic and appealing with whom audiences could identify. Anger and belligerence is fine in supporting parts. No one wants to be holed up with Ms Angry. The safer option is preferable from a commercial standpoint, even if it’s misguided from an artistic one.

It is through Maud’s story that we find our way into the account of the suffragettes’ fight. She is our surrogate. There are inspirational figures along the way – it’s especially good to see the brilliant Natalie Press (My Summer of Love, Red Road) as Emily Wilding Davison. How much sharper and less placatory the movie would have felt had it been her story. And popping up in a cameo as Mrs Pankhurst to sprinkle some Hollywood stardust over the story is Her Meryl Streepness, without whose participation no film can be considered for an Academy Award.

But it is the fictional amalgam of Maud that leads us through historical events. More’s the pity. In merging traits and details from assorted women, the screenwriter Abi Morgan has created one of the dullest protagonists ever to be made the driving force of a major motion picture. Maud undertakes a few decisive acts, including the rescue of a minor character who has Please Rescue Me painted on her face in much the same way that sorority girls in slasher movies have Carve Me Up in the Woods on theirs. But even when Maud participates in the bombing of David Lloyd George’s house, the outcry and divisions this causes within the movement don’t affect her overmuch. Essentially, Maud is first a sponge and then a mouthpiece: if she’s not absorbing slogans (“It’s deeds not words!”), she’s dispensing them.

This is symptomatic of the main problem of Suffragette. What the filmmakers fail to have noticed is that they have made most of the female characters unspeakably tedious, and given all the best moments to the men. Whether it is Brendan Gleeson as a sinister surveillance expert rounding up the rebels or Ben Whishaw as Maud’s husband making a callous decision about the care of their son, the male cast members demand our attention while the female ones settle into a neutralising nobility. When Morgan isn’t certain that we’ve comprehended how rotten it was to be a woman in early twentieth century Britain, she will lob in another scene featuring the picture’s pantomime villain, who is not only (a) a factory boss and (b) a man but (c) a paedophile into the bargain.

Filmmakers as experienced as Clint Eastwood, in his Nelson Mandela drama Invictus, and Quentin Tarantino, in Django Unchained, made the mistake of turning the supposed heroes of their stories into tiresome angels. So perhaps we should cut Gavron (for whom this is only her second feature) and Morgan some slack. There’s no quicker way to diminish a character than through sanctification; one of the reasons why Selma worked so well was that it showed Martin Luther King (played by David Oyelowo) to be fully flawed. Suffragette, though, features few plausible human beings. Maybe that’s why the first jolt of passion and emotion isn’t felt until the actors have all left the screen to make way for archive footage at the end, followed by a roll-call of different countries and the year in which each one granted the vote to women (France: 1944! Italy: 1945! Switzerland: 1971!). We had been waiting throughout to be amazed. That sure got us gasping.

What Gavron and Morgan don’t appreciate is that a film about insurrection told in outdated and conventional cinematic language does its subject no favours; it’s the equivalent of throwing a wet towel over a fire.

Suffragette is on release

When I first read about Claire Barnett, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for child cruelty, my immediate thought was “there but for the grace of God...” Barnett’s two-year-old son Joshua drowned while his mother was checking Facebook on her phone. While I have no desire to excuse her actions, I find it hard not to sympathise. I cannot, hand on heart, say that I’ve never been distracted by social media when I should have been paying attention to my children. It is hard to be focused all the time, particularly when sleep deprivation and boredom are making you feel like you’ll pass out without something else to occupy your mind.

The Barnett case, however, seems to have been about more than just one moment of inattention. The court found a consistent pattern of neglect, with neighbours reporting seeing Joshua left to play out in the road in just his nappy. Judge Jeremy Richards told Barnett that “for a parent to behave as you did, repeatedly, amounts to consistently bad parenting”. Whereas most of us make mistakes every now and then – when we are particularly tired or forgetful – it seems Claire Barnett was making them all the time. Stand down, fellow mums; she’s not one of us after all. But still there’s that lingering doubt: how close does she come?

If Claire Barnett meets some official standard for bad parenting, what does that say about the rest of us? There are, I think, few of us who would admit to being brilliant parents; such arrogance would, in and of itself, knock you down a category or two. But when it comes to discussions of bad parenting, it seems that we are dealing with a number of different, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory categories.

For instance, there’s the badness that is harmful, about which everyone shakes their head and expresses dismay. Then there’s the badness that is practically aspirational, the kind of slapdash behaviour that only serves to demonstrate that you’re a real person, not just a Mummy, after all. Spending too long on Facebook can fall into either of these categories; where it ends up can depend not just on luck, consistency or even morality, but on where you find yourself located within our current social hierarchies.

Among parents like me – white, middle-class, straight, in a relationship – it can be almost fashionable to boast about how bad a parent one is. We can afford to do this because however judged we feel (and we do feel judged, particularly if we’re mothers), we rarely feel at risk of being personally chastised or having our children taken away from us. For us, “playing the bad parent” can serve as a way of gaining reassurance that actually, we’re not that bad after all. We share anecdotes of failure as a way of testing the water and making sure that everyone else is failing, too. If we’re careful, we can even make our “bad parenting” into form of humblebrag (if “distressing” shop-bought cakes, à la Kate Reddy, really is the worst we’ve ever done, then deep down we know we’re doing pretty well).

In the anthology Things I Wish I’d Known: Women tell the truth about motherhood, Emma Freud admits that “the most comforting part of having a crap day as a mum, when you feel you are single-handedly prepping your child for the psychiatrist’s couch, is when you ring a friend and they tell you they are also still in their pyjamas at 3pm, having fed their two-year-old Haribo for breakfast AND lunch.” This is the kind of confession we can look upon with benevolence (ha! It’s Emma Freud! She’s not so perfect, either!). Still, how would this be received were it coming from someone less affluent, that is, someone who is implicitly seen as less “entitled” to have children in the first place? How does their right to be a “bad parent” rank alongside Freud’s?

Performative bad parenting is clearly a privilege not everyone can afford. Amid all the morality tales we construct around raising children, one thing we rarely admit is that the parent whom we deem most successful isn’t the one who raises the child who is happiest, or cleverest, or kindest. It’s the parent whose child best represents the values of the dominant group. Since members of the dominant group are best at raising such children, they can tell themselves that their dominance is a result of superior parenting skills rather than privilege itself. Conversely, as Dorothy Roberts has shown with regard to race, the parenting skills of members of marginalised groups are deemed inferior because their children grow up sharing the values of the marginalised. This supposed inferiority then becomes the justification for a continued low status. “Bad parenting” is judged not by action but by social location. I give my child Quavers for breakfast and it’s anecdote fodder; another mother does the same and she’s set her child up for a lifetime of obesity and academic failure.

We’ve reached a point where “bad parenting” can mean almost anything, from giving your child an apple that isn’t organic to engaging in physical or mental abuse. The broadness of the term, together with the variability in moral import, turns it into a tool for attacking those whom we think shouldn’t be parents at all. What is lost is not just a sense of justice, but any sense of perspective. Hence it can be hard to tell the really bad stuff from those everyday transgressions which most of us cannot avoid. Do many of us really find ourselves one misstep away from being the next Claire Barnett? I don’t think so. There are, however, some parents who are forced to live far closer to being judged than others.

Perhaps for that reason, the rest of us ought to rein in our performances of parental incompetence. Beneath the show of humility and self-deprecation can be found the smugness of those who know, deep down, that their kids will be alright. By and large, “bad” parents aren’t that bad and “good” parents aren’t that good. It just so happens that some of us got lucky.

16-22 October Issue
The Corbyn Supremacy 

Featuring

"I was a teenage Corbynite": the former Blair aide Geoff Mulgan on the Labour Party in turmoil.

George Eaton: For all the uproar among Labour MPs, Corbyn is going nowhere.

Exclusive interview: Maria Eagle on scrapping Trident - "I'm not ruling it out."

David Torrance: Will the Scottish National Party collapse under the weight of its own contradictions?

Leader: Our existing devolution settlement is botched, but a second Scottish referendum is not the answer.

Rachel Johnson: My Corbynite mother, Boris abuse, and talking horse sex with Jilly Cooper.
 

I was a teenage Corbynite: Geoff Mulgan on Trotsky, Blair and the new politics

The turmoil created by Jeremy Corbyn's leadership could help the Labour Party rediscover its purpose. But Geoff Mulgan, who led the Downing Street Policy Unit under Tony Blair, writes that another source of renewal is practice - listening and learning from the doers.

I was a teenage Corbynite and grew up to be an employee of Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell, as well as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Because of this chequered past, I have seen, up close, their virtues and their vices. Having written a book entitled Politics in an Anti-Political Age many years ago, I am not surprised by this latest eruption of hostility to the political class and I welcome challenge to conventional wisdoms and the breaking of taboos, especially in economic policy. Parties need periodic upheavals to remember what they are for. But they also need the humility to learn from the world around them and an ability to empathise, not just with their own side but also with those who do not automatically support them.

I first became involved in politics in the constituency of Hornsey, where Jeremy Corbyn was the agent. I doubt he remembers me but I spent a fair amount of time in his genial company. I enjoyed helping to organise jumble sales (an underrated but essential political skill, though not one he was all that good at) and canvassing often angry and reluctant voters. I was then on Labour's far left and took part in feverish discussions with him and others in the Labour Party Young Socialists that echo today's arguments

Then, as now, we discussed the betrayal of the Parliamentary Labour Party and what we considered to be the moral ambiguity and occasional corruption of the previous Labour governments (of Wilson and Callaghan) and their failure to change the system. As we sat talking earnestly in our damp houses and flats, piled high with books and parcels of the unsold weekly papers that were an odd fetish of the Trotskyite left, we put our faith in Tony Benn as the standard-bearer of a more decent and radical politics and, despite our tendency towards Groucho Marxism ("Whatever it is, we're against it!"), we were serious about changing the world for the better.

Fairly soon, I was brutally expelled as a heretic from the group that I had joined. Academic politics is notoriously vicious because the stakes are so small, and the same was true of the Trotskyites (which is perhaps why so many ended up as academics).

He continues:

This is why part of me welcomes the turmoil of a Corbyn victory. Nietzsche's comment that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger isn't exactly true. But politics does need challenge and crisis to rediscover its inner core, and what is true of Labour has often been true of the Conservatives and Liberals, too. It is through argument - robust, passionate and often bad-tempered - that new truths are found. Labour had forgotten how to have these authentic, open arguments.

But the other source of renewal is practice: listening and learning from the doers. Movements such as Podemos in Spain have their roots in civic action rather than in the residues of Marxism-Leninism. One of the many odd features of Corbynism is that it appears rather uninterested in what everyday radicals are doing - the grass-roots pioneers in fields such as food or recycling, mental health or elderly care. This could be a fatal weakness.

Mulgan concludes:

In the 1990s, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, like David Cameron and George Osborne in the late 2000s, were hungry to understand what made their opponents tick and where the world was heading. There is not much evidence of any comparable hunger now. The new group Momentum could be one source of change but, so far, it has offered only vague rhetoric, rather than showing any appetite for unsettling ideas and practice, or empathy for the unconverted. What that may presage is a dumbing down at the precise moment when Labour, like any opposition party, should be encouraging a thousand flowers of creative imagination to bloom. After all, no "transitional programme" ever led to a revolution, or an election victory. Trotskyism turned out to be one of the narrowest cul-de-sacs of 20th-century politics. British politics will be the poorer if the Labour Party has just turned down one of its own.

Read the article in full below.

George Eaton: For all the uproar among Labour MPs, Jeremy Corbyn is going nowhere

For the Politics column this week, George Eaton talks to MPs about the "chaos" in the Labour Party - including Frank Field, who tells Eaton that any MPs deselected should stand as independents. 

Frank Field, the chair of the Commons work and pensions select committee, told me that any MPs "picked off" through deselection should "cause a by-election immediately and stand as independent Labour candidates". He said they "would probably win" and that "a whole pile" of colleagues would campaign for them. 

Field's comments come after "even left-wingers" were left "disturbed" by the stance on reselection taken by Jon Lansman, a Corbyn insider. ("'When there are selections of an MP, I would like to see MPs who reflect the values of members of the party,' he said recently.") 

"Jon Lansman needs to wind his neck in and get back in his box. He's doing a lot of damage," a pro-Corbyn MP told me. 

Eaton adds: 

Many agree with the view of Ken Livingstone, who told me: "If MPs trigger another leadership ballot, Jeremy will be elected by an even bigger margin." He added that the rules should be changed to allow anyone to stand for the leadership if they are "nominated and seconded by two MPs", a move that would guarantee left-wing candidates a place in future races.  

[. . .] 

Clive Lewis, the newly elected MP for Norwich South, whom some speak of as a future left-wing leadership candidate, told me: "There are going to be teething problems. The leader's office is still being set up; John McDonnell changed his position from conference two weeks ago. I get all of that, but I don't think the way that some people in that room behaved was warranted or justified. The way that Jeremy and John sat there quite stoically and respectfully, and took it, says a lot about them." 

Exclusive interview: Maria Eagle on scrapping Trident - "I'm not ruling it out"

Maria Eagle gives her first major interview as shadow defence secretary, speaking to the NS political editor, George Eaton, and declaring she is still pro-Trident.

On nuclear disarmament - "I'm not ruling it out":

"It's a genuine [defence] review and so we'll be looking at it on the basis of facts and figures with a completely open mind . . . I'm not ruling it out [if the Labour Party decides to endorse unilateral disarmament]."

"I think at a time when you've got austerity and big cuts in public expenditure it's reasonable for people to ask whether or not the money that we're spending on defence generally and on a successor submarine, in particular, is properly spent."

On why she would press the nuclear button:

"I think the key thing for deterrence is not to tell your potential enemies what you'd do. It has to be an option, that is how deterrence works."

On why Jeremy Corbyn was wrong to say he wouldn't press the button:

"For a potential prime minister to answer that question in the way he did isn't helpful, it isn't helpful," Eagle says. "Now, I don't have any problem with somebody who says, 'Deterrence doesn't work.' But not everybody in the Labour Party believes that deterrence doesn't work: I think it works.

"I think it certainly doesn't work if you tell your potential enemies precisely what you are or aren't going to do in given circumstances. I didn't think it was necessary for him to answer that question."

Refuses to defend Corbyn over his comments about Bin Laden:

"I'm not here to say that Jeremy was right or wrong about anything he's ever said: you have to ask Jeremy to justify what he's said about things. But I don't think it helps to take comments out of context, is all I'd say. I don't think it helps. Jeremy has said many things over the years from his perspectives. There's no point asking me whether Jeremy's saying the right things or not. He's saying what he thinks and that's fair enough."

On how defence cuts have encouraged Russian aggression:

"The coalition government were responsible for an 18 per cent real-terms cut in defence expenditure. Nato cut its budget by 10 per cent overall in the last parliament: 2 per cent a year on average. Russia, over that same period, increased its defence expenditure by 50 per cent - 10 per cent a year."

"What's happened is not unconnected: Russian spending going up in real terms, Nato spending going down. It's not unconnected with, can't be unconnected, with what we're seeing the Russians do."

Heart on the left, head on the right

David Torrance wonders if the Scottish National Party will collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions before it achieves the goal of independence. He writes:

Most political parties are broad churches but the SNP's congregation is more diverse than most. It includes traditionalists, socialists, liberals and neoliberals, most of whom possess a feeling of moral superiority. But what binds them even more closely is the "National Question". Since the 1980s the SNP has classified itself as "centre-left" or "social-democratic" - terminology that used to provoke furious debates at conference - but seldom examines what it means to any coherent degree. "No one talks about it," says Alex Bell, who was head of policy for the SNP government between 2010 and 2013. "The first rule of the SNP is don't talk policy. There's a silent pact."

That is slightly unfair: the SNP does talk policy - as a party of government for more than eight years it has had little choice - but what Bell meant is that any differences are masked by the shared pursuit of independence. The various factions are prepared to compromise (and bite their lip) to an extent that isn't true of most other parties. "If the left is always destined to split," Bell says, "then the SNP isn't left-wing at all."

[. . .]

Discipline has helped bring unprecedented electoral success in Scotland and at Westminster, but it has also created a very confused party. Delve beneath the left-wing and anti-austerity rhetoric and you'll find a bit of everything: centre-right economics, centre-left social policy, populism, authoritarian law and order, as well as libertarian stances on sexual and gender politics. Bell calls it "the Mhairi Black paradox": "How exactly does her left-wing vision of Scotland become a reality via the SNP?"

Torrance then analyses the external political changes that have come about in Scotland during and since the rise of the SNP:

Clearly the strategy was to aim for the centre ground, and many on the Scottish left were prepared to go along with this cautious pro-independence agenda during the referendum campaign. But since last year various parties (such as the Scottish Greens), think tanks (such as Common Weal) and movements (most recently Rise - short for Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism) have asserted a more ostentatiously left-wing agenda in favour of independence and in which Scotland's lively arts scene plays an important part. This highlights an obvious point: if the SNP were truly a "radical" left-wing force, none of the other parties would need to exist. Even so, such is the SNP's dominance that only the Greens have a chance of gaining seats in next May's Holyrood elections.

Torrance concludes:

Perhaps, like other insurgent parties and movements throughout Europe, the modern SNP is an example of post-ideological politics, in which the distinction between left and right has become blurred, not to mention distorted, by identity politics and the National Question. "There has been a whole lot of triangulation going on in Scotland over the last decade," says Peter Lynch, a historian of the SNP, "with the four main parties adopting not dissimilar positions."

Nevertheless, one senior insider believes the "tension" between the SNP's old Labour corporatists and more pragmatic factions will have to be resolved. "Is the big state the answer to everything," Lynch asks rhetorically, "or is independence about arguing a different way of doing the state?" This will soon manifest itself over such issues as fracking and, in the longer term, how the Scottish government chooses to use its new tax-raising and welfare powers.

In "Chameleon on a tartan rug", Christopher Hitchens reckoned the "clear hope" of unionists was that "the political differences among Nationalists [would] make themselves felt before independence can be achieved, rather than after, as the SNP envisage". Again, history repeats itself, but as the SNP - in spite of its ideological contradictions - goes from strength to strength, perhaps this no longer matters. Blairites used to talk about "whatever works", and it has certainly worked for the SNP.

Leader: The SNP and the neverendum

The NS Leader this week turns to the Scottish Question and the possibility of a second independence referendum:

The existing devolution settlement is botched. It allows SNP politicians to claim all successes as their own while blaming failures on the nefarious government in Westminster. Both Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon have proved adept at exploiting the ambiguities and anomalies of devolution, allowing the SNP to cover up its internal tensions and ideological contradictions.

While SNP politicians obsess about independence - which they like to say is a process, not an event - the party's record in government is far from distinguished.

Examining issues of education, health and child poverty, the Leader concludes that that the SNP has failed Scotland in many areas.

These are critical failings, and they point to the urgent need for the SNP to improve its performance rather than bring every conversation back to independence. Granting full fiscal autonomy would both recognise the wishes of the Scottish people for greater control over their own affairs and compel the SNP to take full responsibility for Scotland's socio-economic problems. The party could then be held properly to account.

Rachel Johnson: My Corbynite mother, Boris abuse, and talking horse sex with Jilly Cooper

The NS Diary this week comes from Rachel Johnson, who has been at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and the Conservative party conference:

Jilly Cooper - whom I interviewed - was smuttier and funnier than anyone else in Cheltenham, at the age of 78. Our conversation ranged from political correctness and lesbianism to the love of dogs and attractive politicians (she confessed to a surprising tendresse for John Prescott) but my two favourite bits were when she cried with laughter as we read out our winning scenes for our Bad Sex in Fiction awards and her detailed descriptions of research for her new book, Leading Sire. The novel is all about the wild world of stud horses. So there are lashings of horse sex. It was touching when Jilly described in detail the shy stallions that could only rise to the occasion in the paddock when certain faithful mares were waiting patiently back in the stable or when trusted vets were present. We all know men like that and have at times even loved them.

[. . .]

In Manchester for the Tory conference to chair events, listen to Boris and Theresa and Zac - but mainly to go to parties. Every time I penetrated the secure zone, angries wearing pig's head masks chanted, "Boris is a wanker!" at me or, "Your mother hates you!" I wondered if they'd read my artist mother's interview with Michael Cockerell in the Radio Times (tied in to a Sky Arts doc about her last week). In it, she said that she was amazed to find she had "four Tory children", had never voted Tory and was thrilled about Jeremy Corbyn.

Before I got to Manchester, I said that everyone should man up and put on their ties and wear their lanyards and T-shirts saying "Tory Scum" with pride. As soon as I got there, however, I was terrified by the gobbing and abuse and wanted my mummy.

Plus

Laurie Penny: America is at a loss when young men commit acts of terror. But really it's simple - mass shootings are a meme.

Helen Lewis interviews Abi Morgan about her new film, Suffragette.

Ian Rankinon Ruth Rendell's posthumous novel Dark Corners.

Caroline Criado-Perez: Civil disobedience may be the bravest option for feminists but it's not always the smartest choice.

Roland Kelts on how the ageing of Japan is exacerbating the spread of "ghost homes".

For more press information, please contact Anna Leszkiewicz at: anna.leszkiewicz@newstatesman.co.uk

As he rose to his feet at his second PMQs as opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn received a comically lukewarm welcome from Labour MPs. But the session proved to be his best moment to date. As he did at his first outing, Corbyn started with a voter's question (from "Kelly" on tax credit cuts) but this time asked a follow-up. It was a smarter tactic, which immediately put David Cameron under greater pressure than last time (the PM gleefully told colleagues how easy he found the session). Having humanised the issue through Kelly, a single mother to a disabled child, Corbyn then reminded the PM that three million families were set to lose £1,800 a year. The segue from the particular to the general could prove to be a reliably effective tactic for him. 

Corbyn went on to show that he isn't afraid to also deploy some old-style tactics."The Prime Minister's doing his best and I admire that," he quipped at one point. Having asked several follow-up questions, Corbyn returned to crowd-sourcing, revealing that he had received 3,500 on housing. The Tory chortling as he spoke was not a good look for the new "workers' party". Corbyn responded with his best teacher impression: "This might be funny to some..." After Cameron defended the government's housing policy, he gently gibed: "Can I bring the Prime Minister back to reality?" The "new politics", it turns out, might not be as new as thought - and Corbyn's performance was all the better for it. 

There was no knock-out blow, and some Labour MPs fear their leader is simply incapable of landing one, but Corbyn's performance was an unambiguous improvement (though, oddly, he failed to note the government's U-turn on the Saudi prison contract, which he helped secure). As the Speaker, John Bercow, suggested at the end of the session, the length of Corbyn's questions means "we're making much slower progress than in the last parliament" (PMQs overran by eight minutes today). But the Labour leader had every reason to want the event to go on as long as possible. After a fraught week, he found himself on sturdier ground in the Commons.

Maria Eagle’s new House of Commons office is appropriately located. Directly opposite lies the Ministry of Defence, the department she now shadows. “That’s the office we want,” she says, gesturing towards the neoclassical edifice.

In her first full-length interview since accepting the post, Eagle concedes that she was “a bit surprised” to receive the job. The former minister (she served for nine years in government and has been on the Labour front bench for 14) voted for Trident renewal in 2007 and remains a supporter of the UK’s nuclear weapons system, a stance antithetical to that of Jeremy Corbyn. “And that’s why I made sure I said to him, ‘Jeremy, you do realise that I believe in multilateral disarmament and that I’m pro-Trident, don’t you?’ ” Eagle tells me. “And he said ‘Yes, he did realise that’, still offered me the job, and I thought on that basis: ‘OK, he knows that, he’s not going to be surprised by my views.’ ”

Eagle, who was elected in 1997 to represent Liverpool Garston (now Garston and Hallwood), adds: “He wanted to know whether I was willing to undertake a review and I said ‘Yes’, obviously. We need to have a debate about these things. And on that basis he offered me the job and on that basis I took it.”

For Eagle, the debate over Trident renewal is one that Labour has avoided for too long. “I think there’s a mood out there for more transparency, not just in the Labour Party but in society as a whole. It’s not just in the Labour Party that the issue of defence spending is an issue. The Lib Dems had a big debate at their conference, the SNP obviously debate it all the time.

“I think at a time when you’ve got austerity and big cuts in public expenditure it’s reasonable for people to ask whether or not the money that we’re spending on defence generally and on a successor submarine, in particular, is properly spent.” The review, she pledges, will examine Trident “with a completely open mind” on “the basis of facts and figures”. Of the possibility that it could endorse unilateral disarmament, she says: “I’m not ruling it out.”

Eagle refuses to say whether Corbyn should grant a free vote on the issue but denounces the Conservatives as “despicable” for “seeking to play party politics” by potentially bringing forward the Commons decision to December. “For a start-off, they don’t have to have a vote on this, they’ve got a mandate. Since when did they decide it was necessary to have parliamentary votes on whether or not they should sign big contracts? I don’t remember them doing it about whether or not we should get the Chinese to build nuclear power stations in Somerset. I don’t remember them doing it on whether or not we should give Virgin the East Coast franchise.

“If they bring that vote forward, before Christmas, that is a despicable attempt to play politics with this issue and, quite disgracefully, with our national defence at a time of increased tension abroad . . . Their cover for it is that we don’t want it to be an issue in the Scottish elections. It’s going to be an issue in the Scottish elections whether there’s a vote before or not.”

She adds: “They’re here to exploit differences in the Labour Party. Well, we’re going to have a genuine debate about whether or not this is the right way for us to spend a significant amount of money over a significant number of years. We will have that debate properly. That kind of behaviour will be seen for what is.”

Labour conference delegates voted not to debate Trident at the party’s conference (“Delegates decided . . . you can’t say that it’s been kept off the agenda,” Eagle notes) but the issue dominated the final day after Corbyn told the Today programme that there were no circumstances in which he would press the nuclear button.

“For a potential prime minister to answer that question in the way he did isn’t helpful, it isn’t helpful,” Eagle says. “Now, I don’t have any problem with somebody who says, ‘Deterrence doesn’t work.’ But not everybody in the Labour Party believes that deterrence doesn’t work: I think it works. I think it certainly doesn’t work if you tell your potential enemies precisely what you are or aren’t going to do in given circumstances. I didn’t think it was necessary for him to answer that question.” Would she press the button? “I think the key thing for deterrence is not to tell your potential enemies what you’d do. It has to be an option, that is how deterrence works,” she replies.

David Cameron used his Conservative conference speech to denounce Corbyn memorably as “security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating”. “It’s conference-speech rhetoric, isn’t it? That’s what it was, it was a personal attack,” says Eagle when I ask her to respond. “That’s what he does, he likes personal attacks.” She refuses to defend Corbyn’s statement that the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was “a tragedy”, which partly inspired Cameron’s attack.

“I’m not here to say that Jeremy was right or wrong about anything he’s ever said; you have to ask Jeremy to justify what he’s said about things. But I don’t think it helps to take comments out of context, is all I’d say, I don’t think it helps. Jeremy has said many things over the years from his perspectives. There’s no point asking me whether Jeremy’s saying the right things or not. He’s saying what he thinks and that’s fair enough.”

Of Corbyn’s own conference speech, which MPs criticised as addressed to the hall, rather than the country, Eagle says diplomatically: “He was only elected a couple of weeks before he had to make that speech. He made it in the way in which he wanted to make it and that’s fine. I’m not interested in criticising him about what he said.”

Eagle tells me that she supports the 2 per cent Nato defence spending target, which the Tories have pledged to meet. “I think it’s a good thing. As anybody who’s ever been a minister will tell you, one of the jobs of a cabinet minister is to fight your corner for your share of the resource.”

She goes on to charge the government with encouraging Russian expansionism through its defence cuts. “What’s happened is not unconnected: Russian spending going up in real terms, Nato spending going down. It’s not unconnected with, can’t be unconnected, with what we’re seeing the Russians do.”

Eagle and her sister, Angela, were the first twins to sit in the Commons together. After being linked with the post of shadow chancellor, Angela became shadow business secretary in the reshuffle and was hurriedly given the additional post of shadow first secretary of state after criticism of the absence of women from the four great offices of state (leader, chancellor, home secretary, foreign secretary) on the Labour benches. "I think my sister’s brilliant. Give her the biggest job going and she’ll do it and do it well," Eagle says when I ask her about the imbroglio. "Obviously it would have been easier if she’d been shadow chancellor: I’d have got a good settlement," she quips.

"Her experience and perspective on things has always been helpful to me, always. We’re very close and so that’s good, that’s good. We can be mutually supportive and we are. Without any concerns or worries about any downside. It’s pretty good being a twin, I’ve always thought so. I’d recommend it."

On the day we meet there is much unease among Labour MPs about the launch of the new Corbyn-aligned group Momentum, which they fear could be used as a vehicle for the deselection of critics. "It’s not clear to me precisely what it’s meant to be, so let’s see how things go," Eagle says in response. "I think anything that is used in that way isn’t helpful. We need to focus on the real enemy: that’s the Tories. We’re going to try and win the next election. We don’t do that by fighting each other, however that ends up happening."

And does she believe Labour can win the election? "I think it’s tough. But politics is changing, there’s a lot of churn going on, there’s a lot of things happening. We’re in a time of flux. There are opportunities. The Tories may fall apart over Europe. We don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next year. Let’s not write ourselves off. Let’s turn ourselves into a fighting force to sort them out. That’s what my constituents in Liverpool want to see us doing."

One of the greatest causes of unrest among Labour MPs was the launch last week of new group Momentum. The organisation is billed as a "grassroots movement" to harness the energy of Jeremy Corbyn's campaign. But MPs fear it will become a vehicle for the deselection of critics of the Labour leader as parliamentary candidates. The involvement of Jon Lansman, a veteran of the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and an advocate of mandatory reselection, is the cause of particular anxiety. "When there are selections of an MP, I would like to see MPs who reflect the values of members of the party," he said recently. "The fact is that Liz Kendall got 4 per cent of the votes in the leadership contest." 

In my column in tomorrow's NS, I reveal how some are responding to the threat. Frank Field, the chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that any MPs "picked off" should "cause a by-election immediately" and "stand as independent Labour". He said: "If candidates are picked off they will stand as independent Labour, cause a by-election immediately and a whole pile of us will go down there to campaign for them. They can't expel 60 of us. Momentum ought to know that they're not the only pair of wide eyes in the business. We're not powerless." He added: "Those of us who are not going to let Momentum win have a trump card on our side, which is that we would probably win the by-election." Field's intervention marks the first time since Corbyn's election that an MP has suggested that colleagues could stand against each other.

It is not only critics of the Labour leader who have been antagonised by Lansman. One Corbyn-supporting MP told me: "Jon Lansman needs to wind his neck in and get back in his box. He's doing a lot of damage." Sources suggest that Corbyn, who has rejected calls for the reintroduction of mandatory reselection, may soon distance himself from Lansman. 

Momentum supporters cannot fully rebut the claim that it will be used for deselection attempts. Forthcoming boundary changes will force selection contests in some seats and activists can already initiate “trigger ballots” against incumbents. But Corbynites are seeking to reassure their colleagues. Katy Clark, one of Momentum’s six directors, told me: “The reality is, if you’re a good constituency MP, constituency Labour parties recognise that. I would say to anybody who’s worried about new people coming into the Labour Party: embrace it, work with the new members, engage them.” She added: "People need to recognise what took place over the summer. People that voted for Jeremy understood why they were voting Jeremy ... If people supported other candidates they need to reflect on why those candidates weren't successful". 

Shadow minister Clive Lewis, another Momentum director, told me: "If people are concerned about Momentum, all I would say is judge it on what it does. If there are people who are spouting off about reselections and so on and so forth, those people are clowns, anyone involved with Momentum that is talking about that is a clown.

"I can speak for myself, I think I can speak for any of the MPs who've been associated with this, we are doing this from a positive perspective in terms of campaigning and engaging those new members - that is it. I want to see as many MPs as possible, as many members as possible involved with it. It has nothing to do with some kind of sectarian project. That's me saying that hand on heart, those are the intentions. That's not the politics that I backed in Jeremy Corbyn - sectarian politics. Always politics, always policy, never personal ... We want this to harness the energy of the Corbyn campaign and work with the Labour Party." 

It was with just two minutes to spare that Jeremy Corbyn secured the 35 MP nominations he needed to stand for the Labour leadership. He did so only with the aid of colleagues who had no intention of voting for him in the contest and who believed he would lose. After his victory, many of those MPs vowed never again to allow a left-winger on to the ballot. 

It is to remedy this problem that some Corbyn supporters are now arguing that Labour's leadership rules should be changed. In my column in tomorrow's NS, I speak to Ken Livingstone who tells me the the current nominations threshold should be abolished. "Up until 1989, under Kinnock, you could stand for the leadership if you were nominated and seconded by two MPs. I think we should go back to that."

Livingstone added that were MPs to trigger a leadership contest against Corbyn, he would be "elected by an even bigger margin". He said: "It’s going to be very difficult for them, with Jeremy having been elected so overwhelmingly. If they trigger another leadership ballot, Jeremy will be elected by an even bigger margin. MPs can’t remove the leader."

The former London mayor, whose previous aides Simon Fletcher and Neale Coleman serve as Corbyn's chief of staff and director of policy respectively, added: "Part of the problem is the four elections under Blair and Brown. Labour parties weren’t allowed to select the candidates they wanted, they had to choose from an approved list, which shifted the Parliamentary Labour Party massively to the right." He praised Ed Miliband for "abolishing the Blairite pre-vetting rule" and said "parties are now free to select the candidate they want". He added that "If we’re going to have a Corbyn government we’re going to make huge gains that will bring in a much more balanced PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party]."

Corbyn has not suggested changing Labour's leadership rules. But were he to do so it would help ensure that a left-wing successor could not be kept off the ballot by MPs. With the party having nearly doubled in size since the election to 370,658, any Corbyn-endorsed candidate would be in a strong position to win. 

No one has yet been able to tell the full story of why Jeremy Corbyn rose from rank outsider to winning the Labour Party leadership. 

Some people have suggested reasons for Corbyn’s popularity.  He was confident and stood for something, unlike the three other Labour leader hopefuls.  His call for a bottom-up policy process appealed to people alienated from the Party.  He tapped into a latent, deep discontent with austerity. 

Each of these narratives is important.  But none of these captures why 50,000 people allegedly joined the Labour Party since the election, and another 50,000 people became eligible to vote in the leadership race because of union membership or signing up as supporters.

What is needed is a careful review of the profile of these new members, and an analysis of patterns in how they joined the Party.

While we await that comprehensive empirical study, here’s another possible explanation for why Corbyn won.  He won because he offered the politics of love, which appealed in light of the state of British society today.

What is the politics of love? I’ve written about the idea recently with Philip McKibbin.  The politics of love works in a world where politics is grounded in values.  The politics of love makes love the foremost value of politics, and suggests that politics – and politicians – should be motivated by love.  It takes love to be a deep warmth directed outwards towards another person or object.  And it emphasises the importance of active, wholehearted relationships in politics. 

The politics of love draws on earlier references to love in politics made by Jimmy Carter, Vaclav Havel, bell hooks, and Martha Nussbaum.  If applied, the politics of love might shift policy in a more humane direction, alter the language of politics, and transform the relationship between citizens and politicians.

The politics of love helps to explain Corbyn’s victory – in at least three ways.

First, Corbyn called clearly for more kindness in politics, with less negativity, less name-calling, less ruthless and unnecessary personal criticism.  Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has summed this up, saying that Corbyn’s “new politics” is a “kinder form of politics where you respect the other person’s views”.  Kindness is closely associated with love: both are personal virtues, grounded in altruism and goodness, that are rarely invoked in politics.

Secondly, Corbyn sketched policies that expressed a sense of love to constituents.  In his victory speech, he said that one of the first things he did upon being elected was to speak at a mental health open day, to show that “there are many people who suffer in silence from mental health conditions, suffer the abuse that often goes with those conditions, and the rest of society passes by on the other side”.  We need to convey to these people, Corbyn said, that we are “prepared to spend the time and the resources and end the stigma surrounding mental illness”.  In addressing mental health, in wanting to unlock creativity in people through the arts, in tackling austerity, the Corbyn campaign articulated a sense of love for citizens – and this show of love in a deeply lonely society may be part of Corbyn’s appeal.

Thirdly, Corbyn rode a wave of love that has surged through popular movements, before and after his campaign to be Labour Party leader.  The move for marriage equality in the United States, secured in June 2015 with the US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell, was met with a swelling of references to the hashtag #lovewins on social media.  The surprising surge of public support for refugees in the United Kingdom in recent weeks has also seen mentions of love: at one Oxford rally for refugees that I attended, “love not hate” was written on several placards waved in the crowd.  Corbyn’s popularity can be explained, at least in part, by the ethos of compassion and warmth that underpinned these other movements.

If it really is the politics of love that captures part of why Corbyn did so well – and it will only be part of the story – then questions remain for this vision of politics. 

How does the politics of love operate in a world of policy trade-offs? Is the politics of love even possible when modern British politics is cutthroat, petty, and antagonistic? Should the language of “love” be used, when there might be less airy alternatives, like compassion or dignity?

These are questions that will be answered in the coming weeks or months.  For now, we might have a tentative, partial answer to the question of why Corbyn won the Labour leadership race.  Rather than the win being a result of Labour’s supporter system, or Labour’s supporters being deluded, it could have been something deeper, something more fundamental: perhaps it was a result of love.

Rarely do we examine why – exactly – we love that thing we probably shouldn't. Maybe a love of Pop-Tarts stems from excitement for the mornings your parents couldn't be bothered to nourish you. You love Nickelback, perhaps, because they remind you of getting off with some greasy abomination you fancied when you were 13. Or, if you happen to be me, you love American politics because they remind you of pantomime.

Come to think of it though, I hate pantomime. When I was three, my parents took me to a production of Snow White in which the Evil Stepmother (played, I imagine, by 1992’s most washed-up male celebrity) frightened me so profoundly that I had to be removed from the entire situation about three minutes in.

But sometime between being scared shitless by a has-been in a dress and becoming obsessed with US elections, I learned to love scary things. And, in the United States, the closest thing they have to our revered and petrifying tradition of pantomime is presidential elections. The hair: loud and gigantic. The costumes: loud and gigantic. The villains (in recent years) Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump: all loud and gigantic.

In unrelated news, I sometimes worry I’m not enough of a lesbian stereotype. But it’s this concern, paired with my love of US election campaigns, that has brought me to a live screening of this year’s first Democratic debate, at New York’s Stonewall Inn. Stonewall, for those who don’t know LGBT history, is the bar in Greenwich Village where – as a recent blockbuster would have you believe – some white men started the gay rights movement. Anyway, aside from sleeping with women, coming here to watch a Democratic debate is the gayest thing I’ve ever done.

Stonewall, heaving with queer people of all ages, many of whom aren’t even white, falls silent as Sheryl Crow grapples with the national anthem. The words to which, I finally learn, are this: “Oh, say can you see… nah nah nah nah nah America. Guns, freeeeeedom, lalala America. LALALALALALALA.” New York gays, I also learn, are possibly the only people in this country who don’t take this hallowed ballad particularly seriously. It’s surprisingly easy to detect when a person is placing their hand over their heart ironically.

Every four years, when a new election rears its star-spangled head, I promise myself I’m going to get to actual grips with the US politics I so enjoy. Instead, I usually end up ogling it from a safe distance like it’s a festering lizard carcass, and generally being a smug “your conservatives make our conservatives look like hippies” bastard Brit. This year, I’m determined to give the first Democratic debate my full attention.

The candidates begin with the traditional mentioning of their children ceremony or “opening statements”, if you like. Jim Webb, a Kelsey Grammer lookalike and, seemingly, a Republican who got lost on the way to some big GOP thing and decided to become a Democrat out of sheer convenience, literally lists his daughters, of which he has about 17. He stumbles on a couple of their names, chats about serving in Vietnam, then passes the floor to actual real-life socialist, Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, who sounds almost exactly like fellow septuagenarian Brooklyner Larry David. In what looks, or at least sounds like the weirdest ever episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sanders condemns bankers and the One Per Cent.  The crowd goes mental. Trust us filthy gays to get on board with a filthy commie like Sanders.

“Niiiiiice,” a man behind me announces, like he’s watching porn. In a roomful of people who are also watching porn. This is – in fact – his response to Sanders’ mention of prison reform.

But Hillary Clinton, next to speak, gets more than a solitary “niiiice” when she mentions the LGBT community. None of the other fuckers have, so far. The context doesn’t even matter. All within these wood panelled walls, many of whom are sporting Hillary badges, are like, “THAT’S US, GUYS. SHIT YEAH.” The atmosphere turns electric. It’s like watching Nottingham Forest score against Derby, but gayer and Americaner.

Oh, there are some other candidates too though. Shouts of, “Who is he?” abound every time Lincoln Chafee appears onscreen. Chafee – let it be known that gay America hasn’t heard of you. A perfectly pleasant-seeming water biscuit of a man, Chafee declares that, in 30 years of public service, he’s had “no scandals”.

The many Hillary fans, myself included, emit a hilariously outraged sound. Something like, “AAAArHHghhhhhOooooooo.” Chafee doesn’t have the charisma to be this pantomime’s villain, but he’s unwittingly vying for the role by throwing such underhanded shade at the beloved Hillary. Who only, like, sent some emails. Fucking relax.

There’s also some guy who keeps on going on about how he was the mayor of Baltimore once. He doesn’t seem important.

As the debate reaches the background noise stage, lesbian couples begin to bicker. The throaty tones of Sanders badly losing the gun control section of the debate to Clinton (the only candidate with the tits to be full-on anti-gun) are drowned out by the hubbub of drunk, lesbian arguing.                                                

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND LESBIANS,” bellows one lesbian, almost in tears.

***

As I sit in the depths of a pissy smelling subway station, waiting for my train home, something odd catches my eye. Scattered before me, with a casualness that borders on suave, are some toenail clippings. They’re too broad to be fingernails, which would be slightly more acceptable, I suppose. So someone, a soon-to-be voter, probably, saw fit to trim their toenails here. At a station. In front of people.

In the background, a busker quite deftly tinkles piano keys. I wonder how he got a piano down here. This country is so weird. Perhaps I’ll give up trying to understand its politics, and just carry on watching them – like this dispersion of toenails – from a safe distance.

In the last five years  the Conservativess have introduced policies that targeted certain groups of people, - namely, the disabled, the working class, the sick, trade unions, to name a few. But this time, there seems to be one demographic that is ruthlessly under fire under the Conservatives – young people.

The list almost too long. Firstly, David Cameron does not want 16 and 17 years old to have the vote, not only in general and council elections, but also in the upcoming EU referendum, even though it is their future that is being decided on too.

Secondly, the university maintenance grants for lower income students are also being scrapped, a scheme under which students from families with annual incomes of £25,000 or less were given a full grant of £3,387 a year, relied on by more than half a million students in England. Too many times I have seen examples from students who say they would not have been able to survive without it, that it was vital to them. Even before the budget was announced, the importance of the maintenance grant was something stressed to me in every presentation about university finance I attended. Taking that help away away is a policy that will obviously only affect the poorest students, and make no mistake, it is a deterrent for those students. There are poorer students who will not apply to university, though they have the ability, because of the sheer cost of the fees and the lack of the maintenance grant. It sends out the message that you can only afford university if you are rich, that higher education is only for the richest, that trying to go when you are poor is something that will leave you with over £50,000 worth of debt and in the end, many just don’t see it as practical.

Suppose instead of going to university, or after leaving, a young person gets a job. But, as they are under 25, they will not be paid the government’s new ‘living wage’, even if a 24 year old is doing the exact same work as a 26 year old, they will not be paid the same. This is nothing more than a penalty for youth – at 24, you could have a family to support, you need that extra money that you would have been paid, had only you been a couple of years older. How on earth is this fair?

Furthermore, the housing benefit cut for 18 to 21 year olds is also an attack on the poorest young worth mentioning. A centre point study by the University of Cambridge in July concluded that one quarter of young people had experienced unsafe homelessness. There is no question about it, taking away this housing benefit will increase youth homelessness, limiting their opportunities, and restricting their basic human right to shelter. The policy seems to think that these young people are living on the benefit out of choice and not out of necessity, that when it is taken away they will have somewhere else to go, but for some, that somewhere else will only be the streets. Who is the target? The poorest young, who cannot afford to live off of the money of their parents, you know, like David Cameron did.

While we are on the topic of having somewhere to live, perhaps it is worth looking at the conservatives housing policy. David Cameron pledged to turn “generation rent” into “generation buy”. A young single person would have to earn over £55,000 a year outside of London to afford one of David Cameron’s starter homes. For young people who are not from ridiculously rich backgrounds, owning their own home under the conservatives is becoming a dream that is less and less achievable.

Unpaid internships, low paid apprenticeships – the list is truly endless. All of this is fine; if, as I have mentioned before, you can afford to live off your parents, but the frankly disgusting attack to take away help from the many young people who can’t is truly awful.

To summarise, conservative policy in regards to young people will discourage those from poorer backgrounds from applying for higher education, increase homelessness, and increase dependence on the state. Of course, when more young people do become dependent on the state, because tory policy has forced them too, they are demonised, they are blamed for it, as though their disadvantage is somehow down to their own lack of ambition and not, in fact, because conservative policy is making ambition pointless for those from poorer backgrounds.

There we have it. Conservative policy doing its very best to ensure that those born into poorer families have little or no chance or opportunity to advance and so stay poor where they conservatives can continue to make their lives harder .The message is clear, try to climb the ladder, and we will step on your hands from above until you realise that there is just no point in trying.

But it doesn’t matter, because they wouldn’t have voted Conservative anyway.

What was the deal?

A contract proposal for the UK to provide a prison improvement programme for Saudi Arabia. If signed off, the Saudis would have paid the UK government £5.9m for the service.

What exactly would the Saudis have been paying for?

British expertise in running prisons – providing a “training needs analysis” for Saudi prison service staff. According to legal blogger, Jack of Kent, who has been following this story closely, the intention was for the MoJ to make a profit out of its service, as the deal was on a “commercial basis”.

What’s wrong with that?

The idea of the UK government making money out of a regime with such a lousy human rights record is controversial, particularly in association with its repressive prison system.

So how did it happen in the first place?

The bid was submitted by a body called Just Solutions international (JSi), which was the MoJ’s commercial arm established by the former Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, in 2013. Its argument was that it would improve human rights standards in foreign jails. It is now defunct. His successor, Michael Gove, closed it down.

Why?

He was against the idea of selling prison expertise to countries with poor human rights records. He reportedly clashed with Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, in cabinet about it. Hammond apparently argued that it would be poor diplomacy to pull out.

So how come the deal was cancelled?

A number of reasons have been mooted. Downing Street denies the decision has anything to do with the British 74-year-old Karl Andree’s relatives fearing he faced flogging for being caught with homemade wine in Saudi Arabia.

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters have claimed the Labour leader can take credit after calling on David Cameron in his conference speech to cancel the contract. But Gove has always been opposed, and had been fighting against it long before Corbyn’s intervention. The Times reports Cameron had a private meeting with George Osborne about the matter in the morning (of Wednesday 14 October), gave Hammond one last chance to defend the deal, and heard from officials that there would be no financial penalty for ending it: “It did not take Mr Cameron long to make his decision,” the paper reports.

As The Times also points out, the press may also take some credit ­– Cameron woke up to two frontpage stories on Britain’s relationship with Riyadh on the morning of his first PMQs after conference recess.

> Now read Karen Armstrong's feature, Wahhabism to ISIS: how Saudi Arabia exported the main source of global terrorism​